The Story of the Trapper

by Agnes C. Laut

THE MOUNTAINEERS

It was in the Rocky Mountains that American trapping attained its climax of heroism and dauntless daring and knavery that out-herods comparison.

The War of 1812 had demoralized the American fur trade. Indians from both sides of the international boundary committed every depredation, and evaded punishment by scampering across the line to the protection of another flag. Alexander MacKenzie of the North-West Company had been the first of the Canadian traders to cross the Rockies, reaching the Pacific in 1793. The result was that in less than fifteen years the fur posts of the North-West and Hudson's Bay Companies were dotted like beads on a rosary down the course of the mountain rivers to the boundary. Of the American traders, the first to follow up Lewis and Clark's lead from the Missouri to the Columbia were Manuel Lisa the Spaniard and Major Andrew Henry, the two leading spirits of the Missouri Company. John Jacob Astor sent his Astorians of the Pacific Company across the continent in 1811, and a host of St. Louis firms had prepared to send free trappers to the mountains when the war broke out. The end of the war saw Astoria captured by the Nor' Westers, the Astorians scattered to all parts of the world, Lisa driven down the Missouri to Council Bluffs, Andrew Henry a fugitive from the Blackfeet of the Yellowstone, and all the free trappers like an idle army waiting for a captain.

Their captain came.

Mr. Astor's influence secured the passage of a law barring out British fur traders from the United States. That threw all the old Hudson's Bay and North-West posts south of the boundary into the hands of Mr. Astor's American Fur Company. He had already bought out the American part of the Mackinaw Company's posts, stretching west from Michilimackinac beyond the Mississippi towards the head waters of the Missouri. And now to his force came a tremendous accession—all those dissatisfied Nor' Westers thrown out of employment when their company amalgamated with the Hudson's Bay.

If Mr. Astor alone had held the American fur trade, there would have been none of that rivalry which ended in so much bloodshed. But St. Louis, lying like a gateway to the mountain trade, had always been jealous of those fur traders with headquarters in New York. Lisa had refused to join Mr. Astor's Pacific Company, and doubtless the Spaniard chuckled over his own wisdom when that venture failed with a loss of nearly half a million to its founder. When Lisa died the St. Louis traders still held back from the American Fur Company. Henry and Ashley and the Sublettes and Campbell and Fitzpatrick and Bridger—subsequently known as the Rocky Mountain traders—swept up the Missouri with brigades of one hundred, two hundred, and three hundred men, and were overrunning the mountains five years before the American Company's slowly extending line of forts had reached as far west as the Yellowstone. A clash was bound to ensue when these two sets of rivals met on a hunting-field which the Rocky Mountain men regarded as pre-empted by themselves.

The clash came from the peculiarities of the hunting-ground.

It was two thousand miles by trappers' trail from the reach of law. It was too remote from the fur posts for trappers to go down annually for supplies. Supplies were sent up by the fur companies to a mountain rendezvous, to Pierre's Hole under the Tetons, or Jackson's Hole farther east, or Ogden's Hole at Salt Lake, sheltered valleys with plenty of water for men and horses when hunters and traders and Indians met at the annual camp.

Elsewhere the hunter had only to follow the windings of a river to be carried to his hunting-ground. Here, streams were too turbulent for canoes; and boats were abandoned for horses; and mountain cañons with sides sheer as a wall drove the trapper back from the river-bed to interminable forests, where windfall and underbrush and rockslide obstructed every foot of progress. The valley might be shut in by a blind wall which cooped the hunter up where was neither game nor food. Out of this valley, then, he must find a way for himself and his horses, noting every peak so that he might know this region again, noting especially the peaks with the black rock walls; for where the rock is black snow has not clung, and the mountain face will not change; and where snow cannot stick, a man cannot climb; and the peak is a good one for the trapper to shun.

One, two, three seasons have often slipped away before the mountaineers found good hunting-ground. Ten years is a short enough time to learn the lie of the land in even a small section of mountains. It was twenty years from the time Lewis and Clark first crossed the mountains before the traders of St. Louis could be sure that the trappers sent into the Rockies would find their way out. Seventy lives were lost in the first two years of mountain trapping, some at the hands of the hostile Blackfeet guarding the entrance to the mountains at the head waters of the Missouri, some at the hands of the Snakes on the Upper Columbia, others between the Platte and Salt Lake. Time and money and life it cost to learn the hunting-grounds of the Rockies; and the mountaineers would not see knowledge won at such a cost wrested away by a spying rival.